The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney Read Free Book Online

complete, the software initiated an untethered jailbreak, and set up a worm that would migrate to his other Apple devices next time he synched them. From here on out, every update, every e-mail, every text would send a ghost copy to her device, giving her what the Americans so primly referred to as “the fly on the wall,” making his life, and hopefully that of Senator Rachel Sutton as well, an open book.
    The program finished its run right as the shower stopped. Moving quickly, Pilar unplugged her adapter from his phone and put it back in his pocket.
    She was a few feet from her purse, still wrapping the adapter around her finger when he stepped out of the shower, steam rising off his shoulders and a towel around his waist.
    â€œHey,” he said. He glanced at the adapter in her hands and cocked his head to one side. “What’s that?”
    For a moment, she thought how easy it would be to kill him. A single strike with the blade of her hand to his throat, just below his Adam’s apple, and she could crush his windpipe. She could stand over him and watch as he choked and gasped away the last few seconds of his life. The whole pathetic display would be over in less than two minutes.
    Unfortunately, as long as the senator was alive, and as long as he was her most trusted aide, Paul Godwin was worth more alive than dead. Far more, in fact.
    Which meant this was a job for Monica Rivas.
    â€œI was going to charge up my phone,” she said and moved a little closer to him. “But I have brought the wrong charger.”
    â€œYou can use mine if you want.”
    â€œBut there is no time, is there? You must leave in just a few minutes.”
    â€œThere’s a little time,” he said.
    He wasn’t a bad looking man, she thought. Just a hair shy of six feet, perhaps a hundred seventy pounds. When he hit his forties, perhaps his light brown hair would thin on top, perhaps his belly would lap over his belt, but for now, he had a good body and a dopey but still charming smile that made her assignment not altogether unpleasant.
    She tossed the phone and adapter cable on top of her dress, then stepped a little closer to him, her fingers toying with the loose knot holding the towel to his hips.
    â€œYou have a few minutes still?” she asked.
    Pilar Soledad, back in character as Monica Rivas, stared up at him with her best doe-eyed innocent gaze.
    â€œI, uh—” he stammered.
    But he said no more, for with that the towel fell to his feet, and the woman he knew as Monica Rivas knelt before him, commanding his complete attention.

C H A PTER 3
    Outside her window, Dulles International Airport sank into the darkness. Pilar Soledad watched it fade to black, aware that something vital inside her was hardening. It was always the same on these return trips to San Antonio, as layer by layer she peeled away the fiction that was her life as Monica Rivas, Washington, D.C., lawyer, socialite and Mexican-American rights activist, leaving only a core of ice too numb to care for much of anything.
    Her gaze shifted to her reflection in the window.
    The woman looking back at her was gentle, kind, sweet. She wore silver hoop earrings and a light mineral makeup, a powder, with a cool, muted red lip gloss. Her black hair was pulled back in a loose ponytail that draped over the shoulder of her tweed suit jacket. It was a good look for her, professional and stylish, bespeaking of old money and cultured tastes.
    But Monica Rivas was a lie.
    Like everything else about her, Monica Rivas was a cold, cruel, carefully constructed lie. And in moments like this, as she faced the transition from Monica to Pilar, she felt so bitter. For all her struggles, all those years spent clawing her way out of the gutters of Ciudad Juarez, of fighting against the gangs that tried to turn her into a common whore, that for all that, she had achieved little more than a sort of pointless circularity, a racehorse going ’round in